beth (defunct)

@bethposting

rip

she/her
bsky.app/profile/bethposting.bsky.social

i guess follow me @bethposting on bsky or pillowfort

discord username:

bethposting

beth (defunct)@bethposting2/21/2023, 10:52 PM

frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death @micolithe

westside bunn @rhinestoneCowboy2/21/2023, 10:30 PM

thoughts on the ashes of youtube

i am not the most tech-savvy of this anti-site but the main issue with just going ahead and hosting your own video sharing and posting site is the size of the files and the actual cost of hosting the files and the site, right?

is there no way to compress video without fucking decimating the quality and even if there was, would this even be a fix?

#The Cohost Global Feed #webdev #video production #video formats #tech support

beth (defunct)@bethposting2/21/2023, 10:36 PM

yeah video storage is really costly and hard to do at large scales, and if you're streaming video there's a whole additional set of really difficult things to deal with. like, all the big platforms with streaming video have CDNs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network) which reduce latency by having the video sent from somewhere physically closer. there's a reason there's not much in the way of real competition for youtube. you'd need a massive amount of capital to start and even then there's no guarantee you'll get an audience because of network effects. if no big creators upload there, then there's no viewers, and if there's no viewers there won't be a motivation for creators to upload there. even microsoft couldn't launch a twitch competitor after paying the streamer ninja an obscene amount to use it

frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death @micolithe2/21/2023, 10:46 PM

I also think it's worth noting that every single youtube & twitch competitor out there (save for DailyMotion and Vimeo) made really boneheaded business decisions that put them on the road to collapse, while youtube stuck to their core idea of "upload a video for free, someone might even watch it one day." Even if it's become a chaotic mess, you can still do that.

Viddler went pay-only and collapsed almost immediately.

Blip got acquired by Maker Studios who in turn were acquired by Disney, who then just shut the whole thing down.

Ustream got bought by IBM and became some kind of webinar focused thing, I'm not sure they even still exist in that form, but if there's one thing I know about IBM it's that if you are a business and have a license for an IBM product you can basically raise hell until they hold off on decommissioning your shit (hello looking at you cognos transformer/powerplay lmao).

I don't even remember what other streaming and video sites came and went over the years.

Eventually, even the lets play goons like me gave up and said "FINE youtube's the one"

beth (defunct)@bethposting2/21/2023, 10:52 PM

i just went and looked at vimeo and it looks like a film festival with a few high-budget brand videos thrown in. dailymotion looks like a clickbaity news site with headlines about things like "how the GOP is destroying Democrats". they're both still alive but neither is really competing with the youtube market of "one person with a camera in their bedroom". in that sense the real competition for youtube now is tiktok, which has the money of bytedance behind it, but even that is distinguished from youtube by length and by a fairly different algorithm

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in reply to @rhinestoneCowboy's post:

Urban Then and Now @UrbanThenAndNow2/22/2023, 7:07 AM

You might be right for the bigger sites. It's mainly the size of videos (the only way to compress further is to compromise on quality) which I imagine is in the petabytes. If there was a better way to compress videos, YT would have already looked into it. Another issue would be related to networking and global distribution - needs to be responsive, widely accessible, duplicated across multiple regions, resilient to expected loads... but using a cloud provider should help mitigate some of these issues.

Though I think the main reason why social media sites fail in general is that they don't reach a critical mass of users or lack a financial model to sustain them. Cohost has a subscription model which is a good start, and Mastodon is self-hosted (?) so most of the costs can be borne by the users themselves. But basically you'd have to overcome the cold start problem.

And if you want to build a traditional social media site, there's recommendation and discoverabilty algorithms that you'd have to implement and iterate on. But I guess if you're on cohost then you might not care as much about that haha

in reply to @micolithe's post:

colin @vogon2/21/2023, 10:55 PM

also worth noting here that even after all these years and with all the money it makes, nobody is really sure whether youtube breaks even or not or whether it's just burning a small enough amount of money that google hasn't killed it yet

beth (defunct)@bethposting2/21/2023, 10:56 PM

yeah most of everything Google does loses money but it's all kept afloat by the billions always pourin in from Search Ads

frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death @micolithe2/21/2023, 10:57 PM

certainly SOMETHING google does is making money?

colin @vogon2/21/2023, 11:02 PM

yup! selling ads. youtube makes a lot of ad money, but at least as of 2020, less money than selling cell phones: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019

A M Y (bluesky @amy-percent)@amypercent2/21/2023, 11:36 PM

Yeah search ads make like $150 billion or so every year

in reply to @bethposting's post:

frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death @micolithe2/21/2023, 10:53 PM

yeah vimeo's thing was they were for "directors" and "film students"

any video game footage was immediately deleted.

dailymotion's thing is they do basically zero content moderation, i think it's the only place to find some rarer early 90s/late 80s nickelodeon tv shows.